Back in my high school days, my friends and I would sometimes hang out after school and film goofy little movies with someone's dad's "state of the art" video camera. I remember we did a Star Trek spoof once, and it made us laugh when we watched the footage. We also threw ourselves around the backyard and made an "actiony" type mini-movie, and there was one afternoon when we tried to be "extra raunchy funny" in an effort to get laughs. That last one was particularly embarrassing to watch. I mention all this stuff only because Zombies Gone Wild made me think back to those afternoons for the first time in a few years. So thanks, Zombies Gone Wild for being so awful that you reminded me of the lamest years of my life.

The thing is a "home movie" in every sense of the phrase. Here we have three young goofballs, obviously good friends and big movie fans, who took a video camera, shot a movie about nothing, and then somehow got a DVD release out of it. Frankly if you can sit through more than 15 minutes of Zombies Gone Wild without realizing that precious minutes of your finite lifetime are being sapped away by something this amazingly worthless -- then you're probably one of the three goofballs who made the damn movie in the first place.

OK, here's the plot: Three amazing nerds, guys who puke all over each other, fart a lot, and discuss nothing but ass-related topics, head out for a weekend road trip in an effort to get laid. If I told you that more than 70 minutes of the movie were spent with three blithering idiots who make The Three Stooges look like The Three Wise Men, your only logical response would be "So they're in a van for an hour. Where do the zombies come in?" Ugh, don't even get me started on the zombies.

It's not that I don't have a sense of humor about mega-low-budget movies or grass-roots "made-on-the-fly" productions. But there's just nothing about Zombies Gone Wild that works. The thing has the production value of a 1987 Bar Mitzvah video, the three leads are not nearly as funny to strangers as they clearly are to each other, and the whole thing just lurches endlessly (uneventfully) on until a few gray-faced zombies pop up and chew (unconvincingly) on a cast you've grown to loathe. The thing's freakin' unwatchable, frankly, and the idea that you'd dole out 15 dollars for something so poor is just laughable.

The DVD

Video: Full Frame Handycam all the way. Gotta love the digital revolution.